


Shared Experience

by HobbitSpaceCase



Category: Captain America (Movies)
Genre: Bisexual Bucky Barnes, Bisexual Howard stark, Howard loves Captain America, Howard may be brilliant, Jewish Howard Stark, M/M, Mechanic Bucky Barnes, POV Howard Stark, Wartime Bucky, World War II, bucky loves steve, but he's not really a very good engineer, references to Agent Carter, they're both a bit of a mess, though he pretends he's not
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-23
Updated: 2016-01-23
Packaged: 2018-05-15 19:51:50
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,922
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5797615
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/HobbitSpaceCase/pseuds/HobbitSpaceCase
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>From rival to accomplice to lover, and maybe even to friend: this is the story of how Howard Stark, genius inventor extraordinaire, found himself falling for the best friend of his greatest work.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Shared Experience

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you to Scappodaqui for beta-reading!

The first time Howard Stark saw Bucky Barnes, the man was shadowing Steve through Howard’s lab, poking at things and making a nuisance of himself in between glaring at Howard.

Well, that wasn’t entirely true.  The first time Howard Stark saw Bucky Barnes, he barely registered the dirty, tired soldier standing half dead on his feet in Steve’s shadow.  Standing next to Captain America, who had just single-handedly rescued several hundred men in what should have been a suicide mission, Sergeant Barnes was entirely unremarkable.

When Barnes first showed up with Steve, only a day after his rescue, Howard’s first instinct was to dismiss Barnes the same way he dismissed all the boring soldiers who came through his lab in the hopes of finding entertainment to mix up the drudgery of war.  He had Captain America in his lab talking about new suit specs, after all.  One regular soldier should have been easy to ignore.

Unfortunately, his instinctive reaction was made difficult by the way Barnes managed to loom menacingly behind the man who should have dwarfed him.  When he tried to brush it off with a joking, “I’m sure you’d look much prettier if you smiled, Sergeant,” Barnes actually _growled_.  The growl caught Steve’s attention.  The next thing he knew, Howard was apparently rendered invisible in the ensuing argument.  It was not a feeling he liked.

“I don’t know why you’re so angry about this,” Captain America said to his friend.  From the way he said it, this was already an old argument, for all that it was only a few days since they’d reunited.

Barnes all but spat his answer.  “I’m _angry_ that you let them _experiment on you!_   Howard snorted, and Barnes’s resultant glare could’ve peeled paint.  Howard glared back; Steve was the best thing he’d ever created, and he was hardly going to let some half-wit soldier boy lessen his pride.

Steve was far gentler in his own answer.  “I made a choice to do something that could let me help my country, Buck,” he said.  “I’m not going to regret that.”

“Did it hurt?” Barnes asked, sneering, and finally Captain America bristled, his mouth tightening into a line and his shoulders going up by his ears.

“Sure it hurt, Buck,” he said, raising his voice to drown out Barnes, “but you know what else hurt?  Every goddamn day of my life before Erskine’s serum made me _healthy_ and gave me a chance to be useful for once!”

That took the wind out of Barnes’s sails.  His whole body slumped, and he said to the ground, “Right, because it ain’t like you were ever _useful_ to anyone before you decided to make yourself a science experiment for Uncle Sam.”  The look Steve gave him sent questions pinging through Howard’s brain, but Barnes didn’t see it.  He pivoted, instead, and left the lab.  There was a moment of silence in the wake of his departure.

Howard hated awkward silence.  He coughed, brought Steve’s attention back to himself, and tried to forget about Sergeant James Barnes.

 

* * *

The next time Howard saw Bucky Barnes, the man was covered in mud and just about falling asleep on his feet. 

The Howling Commandos had just returned from their first successful mission.  The rest of the Commando unit laughed and joked and made loud declarations about how much they looked forward to sleeping on something other than dirt and rocks for a night, but Barnes hung back and glared at the ground.  The only time his expression brightened was when Steve looked back to ask something that Howard couldn’t hear from a distance.  As soon as Steve looked away, the smile slid right back off Barnes’s face.

The Commandos were gone again the next morning, but Howard could not get the memory of Barnes’s expression out of his head for a much longer time.

Over the next two months Barnes returned to Howard’s lab a few more times, always trailing after Steve like an angry shadow and watching the place as though he expected the scraps of metal and wires strewn about the place to be hiding Nazi soldiers.

Howard did his best to dismiss the glowering soldier who refused to speak to him, but he could admit to himself that he much preferred the times when Steve visited alone.

 

* * *

The first time Barnes visited his lab without Steve, Howard wasn’t even there.  He was instead flying supplies from Italy to France, and he learned about Barnes’s visit only after returning to Italy.

As soon as he heard that a soldier had come poking through his lab while he was away, Howard’s first thought was for his personal corner.  The workbench in the northeast corner held everything he didn’t trust his techs to work on, including the few Hydra energy weapons the Allies had managed to appropriate, and the heating mechanism for a two-in-one radiator and air conditioning unit to make his personal quarters more comfortable, which had somehow morphed into a rather impressive bomb.  

More importantly, behind that workbench was a little box that only Howard knew about.  After his parents died and left him with nothing but debt and an unfortunate name, Howard had been determined that his own life would not end in penniless obscurity like theirs.  He’d gotten rid of nearly everything that reminded him of his past, including his last name.  He’d made a few, small concessions to the small but aggravating part of him that insisted on caring about his mother even after her death, but he would deny those concessions to the grave.  From a certain standpoint, the few keepsakes in that box were nearly as dangerous as the items on the workbench.  No one was allowed in that corner but Howard.  

He was even more suspicious when he heard that the soldier was none other than James Barnes, but his men assured him that Barnes had been nothing but polite, and even showed a respectable cleverness when they answered his questions about the work going on in the lab. 

Perhaps, Howard thought, it was time to extend the man an olive branch.

Howard did not go looking for Barnes.  Nevertheless, he found him the next day, nearly hidden in a patch of scraggly trees south of the mess hall.  The Sergeant cut a lonely figure, leaning against the largest tree.  Smoke swirled up over his head from the cigarette dangling between his lips, but his gaze remained firmly on the dirt under his scuffed boots.  Howard strolled up to Barnes, who turned his head just enough to watch Howard approach through narrowed eyes.

“I bet I could make some improvements to that hunk of junk you call a sniper rifle, if you’d let me look at it,” Howard said, once he had reached a point a few feet away from Barnes.  It was a very generous offer.  Few soldiers besides Steve had their own weapons designed, or even modified, by Howard Stark.

Barnes actually took the cigarette out of his mouth to scoff at him.  “Like I want you touching anything else that’s mine,” he said, squaring his shoulders and crossing his arms over his chest.

Howard wanted to protest that if Captain America belonged to anyone, it was certainly not Bucky Barnes, but he refrained.  Though it irked him to admit, several months of watching the two had left him not entirely certain that Barnes was wrong.  So instead, he put on his most charming smile and amended his offer.  “I could just build you a new gun, and you can decide which one you like better when it’s done.  I have every confidence you’ll see sense with a decent gun in front of you, even if you don’t trust me now.”

Several long moments passed while Barnes stared at him.  Howard wanted desperately to twitch, or speak, or maybe even run, but he shoved his hands in his pockets instead and endured the scrutiny.  It paid off, fortunately, when Barnes dropped the cigarette, crushed it out beneath his boot, and said, “Alright.  Why not?”

 

* * *

After their truce, Barnes began stopping by Howard’s lab more frequently without Steve.  He was silent, at first, merely watching Howard work and frightening some of the lab techs with the intensity of his stare.  Within another month, however, he began to ask brief, hesitant questions.  The more he opened up, the more Howard realized that his assistants’ initial observation had been correct: Barnes was _smart_.

This fact was made apparent the day Howard entered his lab to find Barnes on his knees next to his failure of a flying car and telling a technician, “Of course it’s overheating; you’ve blocked off the exhaust.  You’ve also got some wires crossing here,” he pointed to the mechanism that turned the wheels sideways, “and you’re picking up too much stray capacitance.  You’ll overload and blow this circuit every time you turn it on.”

When Barnes registered Howard’s presence, he turned his head, looked up, and actually smirked.  A dozen inappropriate thoughts ran through Howard’s mind, but he dismissed them when Barnes spoke.  “Your lab is a disaster,” Barnes said, but there was a teasing lilt to the words, and Howard magnanimously decided not to take offense.

Howard smirked right back.  “I was a scientist before I was an engineer,” he told Barnes loftily.  “My job is coming up with the brilliant ideas.  I hire other people for the details.”

“Yeah well, a lot of your details are shit,” Barnes fired back, though his smirk had turned into a smile.

“I’d hire you to fix them, if I thought I could tear you away from Cap,” Howard replied. 

A sad, faraway look flashed through Barnes’s eyes.  “I’m glad you realize you can’t,” was all he said.

Howard glanced between Barnes and his personal corner, and came to a decision.  “I know I can’t keep you, but while you’re here how would you like to help me out on a few more interesting things?” he asked.

From that point on, Barnes became something of a fixture in Howard’s makeshift lab whenever the Commandos were around.  Steve was now the one giving Howard disgruntled looks and staring at Barnes’s back when he stopped by to check on the latest Captain America equipment.

 

* * *

Their relationship shifted once again near the tail end of 1944.  The first chill of winter hung in the air, and though Captain America’s Howling Commandos had firmly established themselves as popular comic book characters back in America, those on the front lines were getting antsy for new information.

Howard had recently been commissioned to create a chemical enhancement for foot soldiers.  Phillips claimed loudly that he was not asking Howard to recreate Erskine’s serum, as that endeavor had proved less than fruitful.  Given that Howard was not, in fact, a chemist, this endeavor was not proving much better.  When adding a dash of solid potassium caused the fourth batch to burst into flames, nearly taking Howard’s eyebrows off (and after they had only just grown back from his last disaster, too), Howard had to admit to some skepticism.

Howard wished he could have commandeered Barnes’s assistance in the creation of the chemical that was definitely not a second serum, but he would only have been a hindrance.  As intelligent as the man was when it came to machines, he was even less a chemist than Howard.  Howard had, therefore, spent the entire day working on his own, growing more and more restless and fending off the twitchy feeling that crawled through his chest and made him do inadvisable things like asking Peggy Carter for a kiss.

Instead of burning his own eyebrows off with useless chemicals, Barnes had been tasked with determining why one of the techs kept electrocuting himself with what ought to have been a simple, energy-efficient shaving device. He had taken it off to Howard’s corner of dangerous inventions.  For much of the day, he worked quietly.  This was perhaps all that had saved him from Howard’s ire, which had already lead to every other tech being banished for the day. Howard had, in fact, nearly forgotten Barnes was even in the lab (and not merely in Howard’s thoughts), when Barnes’s voice startled him out of his reverie on the state of his eyebrows.

“You don’t see too many people with one of these over here,” Barnes said.

Howard turned to see Barnes holding up a thin silver chain with the Star of David dangling from one end.  It glinted incriminatingly in the dim light of the workshop, and Howard snatched it out of the air, scowling.  Apparently Barnes had not been worth Howard’s trust.  He never should have turned his back on the goddamn nosey Sergeant.

Really, he should have known better than to keep the damn necklace at all.  He’d worked hard to forget that there was ever a time before his intelligence had made him a household name and enough money that he’d never have to feel small again.

“It was my mother’s,” he said, too defensive to realize until too late how damning his words would be.  Sure enough, Barnes’s mouth curled in a knowing smirk.  It struck Howard unavoidably then, how good-looking Barnes was.  He hadn’t noticed, when Barnes first arrived in their camp next to Steve, looking like death warmed over and entirely unremarkable beside Howard’s greatest star-spangled invention. 

Since then, as Barnes worked his way into Howard’s lab and into his life, Howard had done his best to ignore the odd flares of appreciation.  Those flares had increased in frequency lately, whenever he watched Barnes bent over a project, detangling a mess of wires or picking at small gears and circuitry with a dexterity that always surprised Howard.

Today, Howard had no patience left to deal with reminders of his past, but he thought he had the energy for something else.

‘What the hell,’ he thought, and matched Barnes’s smirk with one of his own.  “If the Nazis want to kill me,” he said, “I’m going to make damn sure it’s because of what I’ve done to them, not who I am.”  With that, he reached out with the hand not holding his mother’s necklace, hauled Barnes in by his crooked collar, and kissed him.

There was surprise in the lines of Barnes’s body when his mouth met Howard’s, as expected.  Also expected were the large, callused hands that came up to Howard’s shoulders and shoved him backwards against his table.

Less expected was the way Barnes followed him.

The taller man pressed forwards as Howard moved back, till the table edge was digging into the small of his back. A moment later, he was being hoisted up to sit on the table, and Barnes was moving between his spread legs to bring their bodies together, very clearly every bit as aroused as Howard.

Howard grinned into the kiss as desire bloomed through his core.  He wanted something he hadn’t had a chance to do in quite a while (something he had been thinking about, in various iterations, since that day he walked into his lab to see Barnes on his knees besides the flying car), and he didn’t think Barnes would mind.  It took a moment for Barnes to get the message when Howard pushed back on his shoulders, but finally he moved away far enough for Howard to hop off the table and sink to his knees.  Barnes watched him with a wary look that Howard ignored, choosing instead to focus on the buttons and zipper in front of him.  When he got Barnes pants open, he paused for a moment.  Barnes was impressive, beautiful, and very clearly uncut.  Howard had wondered, a few times – well, it didn’t matter what he’d thought.  They still rather obviously had one thing in common.  He took in the sight of Barnes, and then he took Barnes into his mouth.

Later, Barnes offered him a cigarette as they both readjusted their pants and leaned against the table.  Howard refused; he’d never liked cigarettes.  For a while, Barnes didn’t speak.  It made Howard fidget, but for once he couldn’t find the words to break the silence.  It took him by surprise when Barnes finally opened his mouth.

“My dad was Irish Catholic,” he said, and Howard felt distinctly lost.  It was not a feeling he liked.  He glanced sideways at Barnes, but the other man was watching his cigarette like it held the key to all life’s problems.  Barnes continued staring at the cigarette as he spoke.  “He never wanted his children corrupted by his wife’s unnatural ideas. Broke Ma’s arm the last time he caught her trying to teach me some Hebrew.”  He watched the smoke curl away from his cigarette, and Howard thought, _oh_.

“When I was –,” he paused sharply, swallowed back a word, continued, “at Azzano, they strip searched all their prisoners.  Never thought I’d be glad for anything that bastard did for me, but when I was there, all I could think was, ‘Thank God he hated who Ma was so much.’”

If Howard were a normal person, perhaps he would feel compelled to share a bit of his own history with Barnes in return for this detail that he was sure Barnes hadn’t shared with anyone else.  Howard was not a normal person, so instead he said, “I’ve got a few plans for modifications to that rifle I’ve been working on for you, if you’d like to see them.”  He hoped Barnes understood that he meant, “I’m glad you’re here.”


End file.
